52. Kramer vs Kramer (1979)

Plot Intro

Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) have been married for 8 years and have a 5-year-old Billy (Justin Henry). But one day, Joanna reveals that motherhood and house-wifeness is not working for her, so she leave career-focused Ted with Billy and disappears to California. Ted is forced to muster up whatever parenting skills he has to be both mother and father to Billy. But 18 months later, Joanna comes back, and she wants custody… 

Doug says...

We end the 1970s, and on my part it’s with a real sense of thankfulness. I’ve not enjoyed many of the films this decade, finding them lacking in humour, kindness or genuine, down-to-earth affection. So it’s with pleasure and not a little surprise that I found Kramer vs Kramer to be a deeply moving and tender portrait of a father’s struggle to keep his son. 

It’s the first time we’ve seen Dustin Hoffman since Midnight Cowboy, and I’m beginning to consider him one of my favourite actors. In this he plays Ted Kramer, a work-obsessed art designer who is instantly unlikeable as he brushes off wife Joanna (Meryl Streep)’s protestations that she’s leaving him as silly nonsense. 

It’s credit to Hoffman that Ted’s slow transformation from utter dickhead to caring father seems genuine and understandable. The film starts off with a slow telling of how Ted goes from not being able to make eggy bread to a gorgeous scene where he sets son Billy off on his first bike. As Billy cycles off, Ted cheers him on and then, a short pause later, yells ‘don’t go too far’. It’s very real and such a refreshing difference to the toxic ‘hard man’ masculinity that has pervaded much of the ‘70s films. (Although Hoffman remains problematic, as he often didn’t warn Streep of acting choices he’d made, such as throwing a wine glass above her head in a scene and slapping her for real. Method acting is often used as an excuse for being a dick). 

Meryl Streep makes her second appearance in as many years. Much like last week’s The Deer Hunter, she still feels like she’s cooking. It’s not the extraordinary talent that gets nominated at the Oscars every year these days - and I actually quite like that. This is Streep practicing and honing her craft, and while it means she’s not as magnetic here, it makes me value her work in modern films like The Hours and The Devil Wears Prada far more - it’s almost as if she had to grow older in order to truly become transformational. 

The film truly soars though once Joanna (having fled the house leaving Ted to raise Billy) returns a year and a half later to claim her son back. Ted, now having entirely reshuffled his life to make Billy his priority is angry. And the ensuing court scenes are electrifying in the way that they highlight how utterly unfair the courts can be in the case of custody hearings. We know that Ted is a wonderful father, but the courts use evidence from before to blacken his character, moments that even Joanna looks ashamed of in the court. 

It’s a film of quiet subtlety, and no more so than the scene where Ted tells Billy that Joanna is going to take care of him. It’s a gorgeous performance from Hoffman as he works to make sure Billy understands what’s happening without getting upset, and Justin Henry as Billy acts well beyond his years to match Hoffman. 

In the end, you’re left with a thoughtful, touching film that gives equal weight to both the mother and father roles in a child’s life. The divorce itself doesn’t even get shown - it’s all about the kid, and that’s refreshing in an era dominated by ‘hard’ uncaring characters. 

Highlight 

The court cases are tense and full of emotion as the lawyers twist truth to their own ends

Lowlight

The ending was a little convenient, even if it was the ending we wanted. Perhaps more of a compromise regarding Billy’s custody would have been more real. 

Mark 

8/10

Paul says...

Kramer Vs Kramer won big at the 1979 Oscars. As well as beating All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now and Norma Rae to the Best Picture trophy, it garnered Best Director, Best Actor for Hoffman and Best Supporting Actress for Streep (this was her second of 21 Oscar nominations, a phenomenal record-breaker, and first of three wins), along with acting nominations for Jane Alexander and Justin Henry, who is the youngest nominee ever at just 8 years old. And it’s easy to see why - this is an extremely touching, layered and engaging film about divorce, parenthood and the gender roles entwined in both of these themes. 

Surprisingly and refreshingly, the divorce is entirely centric around the husband. Ted starts off as a quasi-misogynistic, career-obsessed bread winner who doesn’t even know what grade his child is in at school. Joanna’s exit in the opening scene at first seems random but the audience, and Ted, gradually discover that she once had a career herself and now feels suffocated in a post-Female Eunuch world where more and more women are choosing to follow their own ambitions rather than what a patriarchal society expects of them. Through Dustin Hoffman’s incredibly real performance, we side with Ted, and support him in his realisation that he has mistreated Joanna and his atonement by being a great father to his oddly articulate son. It’s very sweet and I found myself heartbroken when his boss proves to be so bored and unsympathetic towards Ted’s new-found love of fatherhood, and I felt Ted’s desperation when he is fired and is scrabbling for a new job to pay lawyer’s fees.

Now here’s the most interesting bit. The film not only places the mother’s point of view as less important plot-wise, but as morally questionable. As I mentioned before, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was heavily in the public consciousness by 1979, and the '60s and '70s waves of feminism had given women a newfound power to create their own paths (and justly so). Joanna is evidently a product of this, but while she wants her career back, she also wants 18 months off from motherhood to “find herself” and then come back and gain majority custody rights. The second half of the film is dominated by the injustice that, although she abandoned her child and Ted has stepped up to the mark, the courts will likely rule in her favour because she is a mother. The film may be liberal in its assertion that fathers can, and should, take on the conventionally maternal role, but it is also conservative in its suggestion that Joanna wrongfully feels she has a right to everything. My interpretation is that the film is against women, and perhaps men too, who think they are entitled to a career, a therapeutic break from parenting, and the joys of child-rearing when actually the three are very difficult to mix successfully.

This assertion is uncomfortable to work with but pertinent even today. As an Early Years Teacher, it is still extremely rare for me to work with parents where the father stays at home and the mother works. In cases both professional and personal where divorce or separation has occurred, the children spend a majority of time with the mothers, either through court ruling or through the family’s choice which will inevitably be influenced by what society expects. For a divorced father to have sole custody of their child even now, the mother would have to be deceased, incapable of caring, or voluntarily given that custody, and courts will still favour her above a potentially better father. I may be touching on some very tricky opinions here, so please feel free to contradict me.  

Kramer Vs Kramer explores all this without becoming didactic or overly-sentimental and Hoffman steals it. It’s the closest I’ve come to crying since How Green Was My Valley, and it’s a welcome relief from the heavy-going machismo and darkness of the '70s. Most remarkably, it’s a 40-year-old film that remains relevant today, and that’s a great achievement in itself.

Highlight

The scene in which Ted works out why Joanna left him and explains it to Billy. It’s a beautiful monologue and it’s the moment when we begin to love and support Ted.

Lowlight

A few more jokes would have given an extra layer to the film, I suppose. As many a film-maker has proven, if you laugh with your characters, you’ll be all the more devastated when they fall.

Mark

10/10

51. The Deer Hunter (1978)

Plot Intro

Three working-class men from Pennsylvania go and fight in the Vietnam War. They are Steven (John Savage), recently married, Nick (Christopher Walken) who is in love with Linda (Meryl Streep), and Michael (Robert de Niro) who also has eyes for Linda as well as a penchant for hunting deer. Needless to say, all three come back with various forms of physical and mental damage.

Paul says...

I have a slight advantage over Doug this week in that the two (yes, we have two) copies of The Deer Hunter on DVD did not have subtitles. Bearing in mind that sometimes I misheard lines or missed them completely, I can only imagine how arduous it must have been for someone who wears hearing aids to follow a darkly lit, 3-hour war film in which characters talk over each other with naturalism and semi-improvisation. So I’ll be writing this review with a firmer grasp of what was happening.

Having said that, I wouldn’t give The Deer Hunter any high marks. It has its merits- the main three actors plus Meryl Streep (for we have now entered The Age of Meryl) are extremely natural and tackle their roles with passion. You get a sense that they are friends behind camera and probably having quite a good time. The scenes in Vietnam are intense and briefly illustrate how gruelling this event was. But I think I will forever relegate The Deer Hunter to my list of “Films That Men Over A Certain Age Rave About”, along with The Godfather trilogy, Die Hard, and most things starring Harrison Ford.

My main issue is that the movie is far too focussed on showing these characters interacting like ordinary people, but with absolutely no backstory to any of them, or insight into the Vietnam War. The first hour is dominated by one wedding scene, but who are these men? Why are they going to war? How do they know each other? Why are some of them NOT going to war? These questions remain unanswered, and we’re expected to enjoy the machismo of these men because of their banterous shenanigans. The second hour focuses on their time as soldiers- but who are they fighting? Who are the Vietnamese and what were they fighting for? Again, no information is given. We’re are asked to assume that American soldiers were just there being tortured and killed by a nation who are obsessed with slapping faces and forcing people to play Russian Roulette. By the third hour, which covers the aftermath of these men’s lives, I’d switched off, and I looked up the plot on Wikipedia. 

So as you can see, for a film that frequently appears on Top 100 Movies lists, and is important in the war genre, you would expect a lot more depth. I can only imagine that, coming just 3 years after the Fall of Saigon and end of the Vietnam War, many of the questions left unanswered by The Deer Hunter’s writers would have been automatically answered in the heads of the audience who lived through these events. For ignorant millennials such as us, the political goings-on of the time remain obscure.

So no, I didn’t like The Deer Hunter. Not only because it’s slow, one-dimensional and so butch that you can just taste the testosterone (we’re supposed to like a group of men who liberally use the word “faggot” and shoot animals for a living), but also because it’s nowhere near as profound as it thinks it is. It’s racist, notoriously uninformed, and shows about as much knowledge about Vietnam as Love Island does about couples counselling. It was met with a great deal of controversy upon release for these reasons, with anti-war protestors stationed outside the very Oscars ceremony where it won Best Picture, which I think is quite justifiable. The icing on this ultra-American cake is the final shot, in which the cast sing a very patriotic song about how great the USA is, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth.

If you want a good film about people going to war with excitement and coming back with trauma, then two previous Best Picture winners, All Quiet On the Western Front and The Best Years of Our Lives, achieve this with far more skill.

Highlight

The Russian Roulette scenes are, indeed, very intense. It’s just a shame that there’s no evidence to suggest the Vietnamese people play this game as frequently as the writers seem to think. 

Lowlight

The final hour is such as drag. I suggest you buy a ticket to Miss Saigon instead.

Mark

2/10

Doug says...

Paul is right, this is a dull, offensive and ultimately pointless film. Yes, there were no subtitles and so I relied on him and Wikipedia to keep me updated as to what was happening, but ultimately there’s two major reasons as to why this is a dusty piece that should probably be left in the history archives. 

Number one: length. Yes, yet again I’m finding myself astonished at the sheer arrogance of directors who feel their story is worth expanding out to a ridiculous length purely (one assumes) for the ability to go ‘look, my film is three hours!’ To put it into context, the opening wedding scene which should have taken around ten minutes takes over forty five. It’s bizarre. 

Tautness is not a trait associated with ‘great’ films, which are allowed to ramble on and have about eight epilogues. And yet - I can’t help thinking about Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette  - a stand up routine available on Netflix in which she creates a groundbreaking narrative and ultimately creates a blazing piece of theatre. It’s an hour long. Also Pixar’s Coco - which deals with Alzheimers, age, death, family, fame and music - is an hour and a half. 

This film should have been an hour and a half. By the third hour I too was so disengaged that I spent most of it scrolling through Instagram and planning my itinerary for the week ahead. It is elongated and obtuse - and while audiences may have at the time understood the context differently (as Paul says), that is no reason for it becoming an ‘iconic’ film - if the context isn’t explained enough that millennials such as us can pick it up then the film becomes irrelevant. 

My second point is more of a personal bugbear: I hate ‘improvised’ theatre and film. I went to drama school, I’ve seen literally hundreds of plays, I’ve been exposed to more ‘improvised/devised/cast-created’ shows than most people have seen Disney films. And let me tell you - nine times out of ten, it does not work. You end up with overlong pieces tiptoeing around the core subject with actors desperately trying to grab more lines or ensure the spotlight is on them. The only time it does work is when there’s a director with a firm hand, using improvisations from rehearsal to then actively create a script - which everyone then sticks to. Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh - these people are able to do that, whereas here so many scenes have been gratuitously allowed to run on while the actors murmur and burble their vaguely misogynistic/homophobic ‘banter’. 

And actually I haven’t even touched on the racism. Twenty years before this film, another war film was released that dealt with Asian culture (similarly the ‘enemy’ was a race stereotyped as cruel, Japanese instead of Vietnamese). That film was Bridge Over The River Kwai and yet they managed through the (far superior) film, to break through the ‘us’ and ‘them’, and actually show the humanity on both sides. Here we’re just subjected to a lot of Vietnamese people insisting everyone play Russian Roulette and then cheering as people blow their brains out. The actual existence of any Russian Roulette is uncertain, so the choice to feature it so heavily throughout the film - metaphor for war or not - is disingenuous and ultimately a low move. 

Oh Meryl, you can do better than this. 

Highlight

The Deerhunter theme tune is utterly beautiful, and is rightfully featured on many ‘Film Soundtrack’ compilations. Skip the film and just listen to it on Spotify. 

Lowlight

Pick your favourite. For me it has to be the overlong improvisational scenes full of a bunch of men muttering. So so dull. 

Mark

1/10